Yonhap
3/6/2007
North Korean diplomats have recently been limited to taking only one of their children with them when assigned abroad amid reports of some diplomats seeking asylum out of their impoverished homeland, an informed source said Tuesday.
The measure is a revival of a decades-old regulation, which has been temporarily suspended since 2002, the source said while speaking on condition of anonymity.
“North Korea is said to have ordered its diplomats and officials overseas to send all but one of their children back to Pyongyang,” the source said.
“It appears North Korea believes there is a greater chance of defection by these expatriates as they now have all of their family members overseas,” the source added.
Defections by North Korean diplomats or their families are rarely publicized, but government officials say they are not unprecedented.
South Korea usually maintains a tight lid on defection cases involving ranking North Korean officials out of fear they may provoke the communist nation, thus making future defections by others more difficult.
More than 10,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War while as many as 300,000 others are believed to be hiding in China or other neighboring countries.
NK Diplomats Ordered to Send Kids Home
Korea Times
Lee Jin-woo
3/6/2007
North Korean diplomats and those who work at overseas branches of state-run trading companies have been ordered to send their children home except for one child by the end of this month, sources said.
The order was issued on Feb. 14, after a one-month-and-a-half notice, the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In the early 1990s, the North ordered its students abroad to return home during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakdown of the Berlin Wall.
But this was the first time for Pyongyang to call home the children of diplomats and officials at trading companies.
The measure is a revival of a decades-old regulation, which has been temporarily suspended since 2002. The ban was lifted in 2002 to help more children pick up foreign language skills in a more advanced educational system.
The North has decided to return to its previous policy to prevent possible mass defection of its diplomats and white collar workers abroad with their families in the reconciliatory mood, including the ongoing efforts to normalize the diplomatic ties between Pyongyang and Washington, experts on North Korean affairs said.
Neither primary school students nor college students, however, are allowed to stay overseas.
“Diplomats and workers at state-run trading companies are allowed to keep only one child, who is old enough to attend either junior high or high school, but primary school children and college students are banned from staying overseas,’’ Hong Soon-kyung, a North Korean defector, told The Korea Times.
A former senior North Korean diplomat, Hong serves as chairman of an association of North Korean defectors in Seoul.
Hong said it was because the Stalinist state does not want its young generation to be influenced, or brainwashed, by U.S.-style market economy.
He said North Korean college students are allowed to study only in China, the North’s closest ally.
“Those North Koreans who go overseas for physical labor have not been allowed to bring any child, not even one,’’ he added.
Under the order, some 3,000 North Korean children in some 50 countries will have to return home, sources said.
